tore off the electrical tape, picked up the mini flashlight and checked all the fuses were pushed in. They were. I switched ECUs, the engine’s brain, plugged the new one into the mother board and flicked the ignition back on to reboot. No dice. I got back on the radio. ‘The new ECU isn’t working. Any ideas?’
‘Wait a minute.’ Then, after a long pause, ‘We’re coming out to you. Stay right there.’
Where was I meant to go …?
There must be something I could do. I looked across to the giant plasma screen on the other side of the track and saw a small Japanese driver having similar problems. He was staring down at his car with his helmet on and speaking to his team on a tiny mobile phone. After a minute he started gesticulating wildly, hurled the phone into the tarmac and stamped on it twenty times with both feet. Bad reception can really get you down.
Men in orange suits wanted me out of the car, but if I walked too far away it would be classed as ‘abandonment’ and could eliminate us from the race. Ian and Spencer turned up but couldn’t find the fault.
As a last-ditch effort I put the car in first gear and bunny-hopped it 20metres using the kick from the starter motor. This really upset the French marshals, who chased after me shaking their fists until the battery ran out of juice. Our race was over.
It was gut-wrenching. We came back to a warm reception in the pits.
They had done an incredible job, especially Brian. His beady eyes had disappeared into his skull. Guys like him never slept and he was still reviewing telemetry screens long after everyone else had cleared off. He dragged me into his data den. ‘One of your lap times was ten seconds faster than anybody else on the circuit. TEN! Bloody brilliant. Looks like the sodding fuel pump packed in. Some tossing little wire that burned out, a fifty pence component, I bet.’
Hearing that we had paced faster than anyone for nearly four hours numbed some of the disappointment, but nothing compared to actually finishing the race.
The Audis continued their faultless run to victory the following day. Our crew fell asleep around the pit. Sleep was hard to come by. When my eyelids eventually closed, the dotted white lines of Mulsanne were still whipping through my retinas at 200mph.
Chapter 6
Daytona Endurance
After the dust settled from Le Mans, I started talking to some of the large manufacturer teams about driving opportunities for the following year. I was duly informed by one representative that they were ‘talking to big names from Formula 1’. Ben was only a three-letter word, so she had me there.
Fortunately Ascari kept me for the following season for a programme that included two of the most prestigious sportscar races in the world: the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona followed by the 12 Hours of Sebring.
I decided it was time to take the plunge and leave my day job. In between races, I had been working as a brand manager for Scalextric, which included a cosy five-hour daily commute on top of training. It was fun coming up with ideas for toys. I broke new ground by creating the first Bart Simpson Scalextric set, although I got into a little trouble for developing super-sticky magnets that made the model cars travel faster than light. My friends loved it too, dubbing me the ‘smallest racing driver in the world’ and referring to my backside as a hollow extrusion.
Well, this toy racer was off to Daytona, the birthplace of NASCAR. In the 1950s moonshine runners flocked from the southern counties to race the long flats of Daytona Beach; the best drivers of the Prohibition era had honed their skills outrunning the police on country roads. Here they belted along the beachfront avenue and blasted sand into the faces of spectators. People liked that, so in 1957 race promoter Bill France built the biggest, fastest Speedway the world had ever seen.
The 2.5-mile tri oval with its 31-degree banking was colossal. Even grizzly racers were shocked by the scale of the ‘Big D’ and the sprawling edifice of its surrounding grandstands. ‘There wasn’t a man there who wasn’t scared to death of the place,’ Lee Petty once said. The whitewashed wall that encased the Speedway was ever ready to punish the over-zealous.
An infield road course had been constructed inside the oval for sport-scar racing, and that’s where we came in. My prototype rattled so quickly through the banking at Turn One that for the first few laps my eyeballs couldn’t keep up with the sweeping sheet of asphalt. It was dizzyingly fast; a 180mph turn, tighter than a jet fighter could pull.
Racing a prototype in Europe through a packed field of GT cars had taught me plenty of cut and thrust. The difference at Daytona was the sheer volume of slower traffic in the tight infield section. I now realised how Batman felt driving the streets of Gotham after igniting the after-burners on a Monday morning. If you gave any quarter, the cars you wanted to muscle past sensed hesitation and only made it harder to get by.
Getting past a prototype of equal pace was more challenging. I closed on one at 170. I couldn’t recognise his helmet but his car’s body language looked edgy. The banking amplified the suspension compression from tons of down-force and the bellies of both our machines slammed the deck at every bump. My aero went light in his dead air and I hung on to the steering pretty tight while the whole world wobbled around me.
We were bearing down on a pair of GTs running line astern. I had a good slingshot from their slipstream, moved one lane higher towards the wall and overtook. The prototype didn’t see me coming and swung out with me alongside.
The banking was beginning to flatten out for the straight, so this was not a good time to change direction. The only space left for me on the track was the high side, which was covered in sand and marbles, so that’s where I went. The steering instantly went light as the slick tyres lost contact with asphalt, scrabbled with the dirt and pointed me at the wall. A microsecond later, the rear lost traction. As the camber fell away I had to get out of the throttle and tap some brake to nudge the front away from the wall.
I passed the prototype with a front wheel locked, pitched sideways so close to the wall I thought it would shave the rear wing endplate. It may have looked ugly but I made it stick.
I cruised the pit lane later to find the guy I overtook and maybe share a laugh. There he was, overalls tied at the waist, wearing a baseball cap with big aviator shades drooping off the end of his nose. His neck was frail for a racing driver, but not for a 77-year-old. His voice sounded familiar as he chatted to his mechanic, then Butch Cassidy’s clear blue eyes saw me coming. I froze. Paul Newman, star of the silver screen for more than half a century, racer of old and charitable angel who parachuted millions of dollars into worthy causes, was the coolest dude I ever saw. And that’s exactly how I left him. He had enough people bothering him for a piece of his time.
Werner was on spectacular form and stuck the Ascari Judd on pole position. He spent the afternoon flexing his muscles under the Florida sunshine and cooking the ‘brai’ so that ‘none of you Engleesh burn my meat’.
My duty at Daytona was to develop an experimental turbo-charged engine in the sister Ascari. The words ‘experimental’ and ‘endurance’ made poor bedfellows. Not only was the engine gutless and expensive, but parts of the rear wing kept falling off.
During the race I had to watch my mirrors to keep an eye on things. After the third pit stop to repair the wing we realised that the entire wing post was being shaken loose by the deafening harmonics of the engine. It was deemed too dangerous to continue, so that was the end of that. Maybe one day we would finish an enduro event.
The twelve-hour race at Sebring was half the duration of Daytona 24 but twice as exhausting. Mars had a more temperate climate than Florida in March. And the Martians themselves were pretty conservative by comparison to the 150,000 fans who camped at the track during America’s spring break. The usual petrolheads were joined by tens of thousands of college kids who partied hard. The police brought an armoured tank to keep them under control.
Swarms of them descended from the nearby beaches for a look at some fast noisy things. Tanned babes in scant bikinis toting dollar fifty plastic necklaces exchanged them at every opportunity for bodily fluids or a flash of flesh.